Modernity’s ending is the loss of belief in human control over existence.

Evidence

This loss of conviction about the human capacity to craft and steer its existence or even to secure its future is the most profound and devastating sense in which modernity is “over.” Neoliberalism’s perverse theology of markets rests on this land of scorched belief in the modern. Ceding all power to craft the future to markets, it insists that markets “know best,” even if, in the age of financialization, markets do not and must not know at all, and the hidden hand has gone permanently missing. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 435

Categorization

• SEED: The claim ‘markets do not and must not know at all, and the hidden hand has gone permanently missing’ is a sharp inversion of market-knowledge orthodoxy worth an essay on how financialization replaced the information-bearing market with a blind one.
• DEEPTHINKING: The fusion of civilizational despair, market theology, and the idea that modernity itself is ‘over’ in the sense of forfeited mastery is a dense, paradigm-shifting formulation of what’s wrong with neoliberal rationality.
• XREF: connects to: Failed human-technology relationships produce a mythical, collapse-prone everyday life. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 834; Modernity’s reflexivity makes its own rational grounds ultimately puzzling — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 124; Modern Western man’s alienation results from losing connection to an ethically ordered cosmos. (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Modernity’s reflexivity makes its own rational grounds ultimately puzzling #complicates (0.75) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 124
• Modern Western man’s alienation results from losing connection to an ethically ordered cosmos. #corroborates (0.75)
• Modern worldview collapsed the transcendent beyond back into subjective life #expands (0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 833
• Modernity’s core structures can be judged against how well they serve life. #qualifies (0.72)